Aaron Strong

Ph.D. Candidate in Environment and Resources

Contact Information

Email: alstrong@stanford.edu

Office: Y2E2 226

Group

Bio

Throughout his academic development, Aaron has staunchly refused to choose between studying the natural and human worlds, seeing them as one. Before coming to Stanford, Aaron was an environmental policy research associate at MIT, where he published articles on the scientific and political issues surrounding ocean iron fertilization, a proposed geoengineering technique. He has also worked as a research scientist in marine biogeochemistry and microbial ecology labs at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and at the University of Montana. Aaron received his master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in climate change policy and political geography and holds a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in biology and political science. Aaron grew up on a lake in Maine, and had the good fortune to live in Sri Lanka, Japan and Belgium during his childhood. After proposing in the middle of a stream while doing field-work in northwest Iceland, Aaron married his wife Christina in September 2012.

Aaron studies feedbacks of the carbon cycle to global change factors, and the policies for operationalizing biogeochemical ecosystem services (such as carbon sequestration and nitrogen cycling) in environmental management frameworks. Aaron's current projects include studies of carbon export on shallow continental shelves, human drivers of changes of phytoplankton productivity in estuaries, and the loss of carbon from soils in grasslands subjected to experimental conditions that mimic global change. Aaron also studies the conditions under which environmental managers take actions to assess carbon cycle impacts. In all this work, Aaron is interested in how human activities combine and interact to control ecosystem responses to climate and other global changes and how human societies develop methods to assess and respond to these complex changes. While a PhD student, Aaron has been actively involved in the development of California's climate change policies.

Aaron's teaching focuses on the development of interdisciplinary global change science and governance courses, which immerse students in the ecosystems ecology, biology, oceanography, international relations, law, governance, economics and philosophical underpinnings of global change. In these courses, Aaron seeks to inspire students to build and construct their own connections between disciplines, and to see the world around them as always simultaneously shaping the human experience and being shaped by the human experience.